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Showing posts from May, 2014

Spiritual Disciplines: Community

This brings us to our final installment in this blog series. Over the past several weeks we've been reviewing a recent sermon series entitled Freedom. The premise of the series was that many Christians miss out on enjoying a life of freedom in Christ, and that is often due to a neglect of the spiritual disciplines. Spiritual disciplines include: worship, prayer, giving, Bible study, serving, and community. These are tools given to us by God by which to enjoy the freedom that Christ has won for us. It's important to note that practicing these disciplines are not what make us Christian. A Christian is a Christian because they have placed their faith (their lives) in Christ. We become a Christian by the grace of God through faith in who Jesus is and what He accomplished through His life, death, and resurrection. We were all born enslaved - under the bondage of sin and under the tyranny of its power over us. But Jesus came from heaven to liberate us. Through His death on the cr

Spiritual Disciplines: Serving

Here's installment #5 in this current blog series. I'm in the process of summarizing the six spiritual disciplines that we discussed in a recent sermon series. This week I'm reviewing the spiritual discipline of serving/service. As I've mentioned in each of these blog posts, the best way to learn about or to be reminded of the spiritual disciplines is to listen to the messages from the sermon series. To do so click here: Freedom . Usually, the topic of spiritual disciplines is taught with an individualistic emphasis. Each of us as individual followers of Jesus are to worship, pray, give, read our Bible, etc. That is true. Each individual follower of Jesus should practice the spiritual disciplines on their own. However, the richness of the spiritual disciplines is experience more fully and completely when they are practiced alongside other believers. The discipline of service illustrates this well for us. During the sermon series we looked at 1 Corinthians 12-20 a